Thursday, December 31, 2009

I think this is exactly backwards. If Adam James had been a kid from another family -- say, with a working-class single mother who had complained -- it's a completely different scenario. Tech simply had buyer's remorse with Leach and took the first opportunity to dump him. That the father is so famous gives Tech's actions a veneer of legitimacy. And gee. Who could have been ESPN's "source close to the family?"

Well, too bad for Craig James. He used to seem at least likeable. And too bad for Tech students. They just lost the only person that made Lubbock half-way interesting.

UPDATE: Hmm. I wondered how boosters would feel about this. But look: here's a year-old email exchange between Tech officials and Dallas booster Jim Sowell (I assume that's this guy). Sowell hates Coach Mike Leach and offers this interesting opinion: "I promise you our prospects of getting a better coach are much higher than Mike's prospects of getting a better job." Riiiiiiight.

I have never wanted Michigan State to win so bad in all my life.

MORE: It's slow here at my desk so I am taking immense enjoyment in the Texas Tech email exchange, especially when another booster -- seemingly tired of Sowell's bitterness -- chimes in with a defense of Coach Mike Leach (he's "filled the stadium, sold all the suites, been to 9 straight bowls") and warns: "he is not a 'good 'ol boy' [sic], he's a quirky intellect who is a football coach. Love him or hate him, you guys should not be bowing your necks and running him off because you can't get along with or relate to some city slicker Yankee agents. I agree that you need to make some changes to his contract but, they should be done in a spirit of good will." Voice of reason, ignored as usual.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

There's something odd about the ancestry.com tvspots. Maybe it's the way they portray researching a family tree, like it's a way of filling a hole in your life or healing an emotional wound. Therapy by other means. Isn't that a dangerous overpromise? Their earlier stuff had a much simpler message. I actually enjoyed watching those.

He was selected by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to train with three others for Operation Grouse, the raid on a hydroelectric power station near his hometown where the Allies suspected that heavy water, a key component in the atomic weapons process, was being produced in order to build a Nazi atom bomb.

He parachuted with three others onto the Hardangervidda plateau on October 18 1942. But a planned rendezvous with British engineers never materialised after the Britons' gliders crashed and the survivors were tortured and executed.

As a result the Germans were alerted to Allied interest in heavy water production, but Haugland was ordered to wait on Hardangervidda, where his team subsisted on moss and lichen and, just in time for Christmas, a wandering reindeer. In sub-zero temperatures he kept in contact with the British using a radio to which he improvised spares using a stolen fishing rod and an old car battery. Every night at 1am he would make contact, often unable to control the chattering of his teeth, using the password "three pink elephants".

It was February 1943 before Operation Gunnerside (named after a grouse moor owned by Sir Charles Hambro, head of SOE) was mounted. Six Norwegian commandos were dropped by parachute, and after a few days' search, met up with Haugland for a new assault on the hydroelectric plant.

The heavily defended plant was now surrounded by mines and floodlights and accessible only across a single-span bridge over a deep ravine. The Norwegians climbed down the ravine, waded an icy river and climbed a steep hill where they followed a narrow-gauge railway and entered the plant by a cable tunnel and through a window. In the ensuing sabotage hundreds of kilograms of heavy water was destroyed. Though 3,000 German soldiers searched for the saboteurs, all escaped. The Nazi heavy water project never recovered.

Oh, and then there's the part where Thor Heyerdahl asks him to be a crewman on the Kon-Tiki.

What, exactly, is Tiger buying here? Is what's in the email and texts worse than what everyone can guess is in the email and texts? Especially after we've already read about the "crazy Ambien sex?"

I don't know if publicly paying out a million dollars to this cocktail waitress, a million dollars to that cocktail waitress, and a couple hundred million to the wife is quite the way to repair an image. Or are these ridiculous dollar amounts meant to distract us from all of Tiger's prescription drugs?

Thursday, December 03, 2009

Audi just spent $10 million to debut the new A8 at Art Basel Miami Beach. Audi "couldn't find a venue grand enough for the occasion. So it built one instead. Rising five stories above an oceanfront Miami Beach parking lot north of the Eden Roc hotel, the boxy and black temporary complex boasts 42,000 square feet of space. That includes a 1,000-seat auditorium, an underground kitchen, a stage with two revolving platforms for showing off the new $100,000 Audi A8 and an art gallery for installations from Miami's Rubell Family Collection. The pavilion opens Wednesday."

ADDED: Oh my gosh, did you preview tomorrow's Country Music Auction? LOOK AT IT! There's stuff from Roy Rogers, Johnny Cash and Loretta Lynn! What's not to love? I want the Dale Evans hand-tooled leather fold-out purse (lot 21) and I'd marry the man who buys one of the Nudie suits and wears it.

At least Michaels did OK: "the largest U.S. arts and crafts chain...swung to a third-quarter profit on the strength of Halloween and improved sales in other categories....The Irving-based company also noticed that shoppers showed up later for fall and Halloween merchandise, continuing a trend of making purchases closer to when they need items."

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

If you're going downtown to play in the Neiman Marcus windows, check the hours of operation first. The schedule definitely does not correspond to store hours. Even on weekends. And you can't make kids understand that.

But if you're anywhere near the state of Florida, oh my gosh. Go see the Osborne Family Lights. There is no way to hype or overhype how great this is and the effect it has on a crowd.

I was waiting."The thing that Tiger needs to look at is, whatever happened, just tell the truth." Also? My two cents? Maybe ease up on the painkillers. Oh, let's not dwell on it. Instead, let's think back to a time when advertisers could still make Tiger seem likeable.

And hey! Isn't John Daly cute now? His girly friend used to be a marketing manager at Hooters, which is funny. The thing with Daly is, he's gotten into all kinds of trouble, all of it seedy and not sponsor-friendly, and still he's a fan favorite. It might be because he never really tried to "manage" a "crisis."